Where are you, salsa?
Pass the methadone… there’s no salsa social for me this week. Studio is closed. Lord help me, I’ll try to listen to bachata instead to substitute, but I don’t know, I think this might be worse. I might get desperate and hit the streets looking for a good time. I’ve been working the phones, trying to get more instruction time; one teacher is not enough for me anymore…
What do real salseros and salseras do? Not go to socials. They camp in parks with their boom boxes (and back up boom boxes for when the batteries die), congas, cowbells, marakas, and bongos and blast salsa music while playing along like a band. If you don’t have an instrument, you clap you hands like the clave. You tap your feet to the beat with your sneakers with the PR flag etched into each side. See picture below.
This is how I spent Memorial Day weekend. I consumed 3 beers, 2 hot dogs, a burger, a pastelito, rice, chips, and 2 chicken legs with BBQ sauce. Oh, and a salad. I’m a rookie because I drank out of the bottle until someone had to teach me that you need to drink out of a plastic cup so the police don’t see you. And when the police do see you, you have a separate beer stash to offer them to go away. No-one understood me when I asked about on-1 and on-2, and when I watched them dance I could not figure out WHAT number they danced on. Numbers don’t seem to exist in street salsa.
Even though I was surrounded by blasting salsa for like 6 hours straight, making the gentrifiers wish more and more that the PRs would just continue to die out from liver disease and leave them apartments (for real, it’s true), it made me more lonely. Where are my on-2 buddies (like I have many)? Reminds me of this Peanuts cartoon (below).
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Drinking from open container in a public park cost $25. Ask me later how I know that.
Oooh I don’t do beer but in my college days found a flask of light colored liquor could be played off as a mini-canteen full of “water” necessary for your condition. (The condition is the need and desire to get a bit tipsy for a low price to loosen up in whatever social situation you are on your way to.)
I honestly think you can get away with dancing with on-1 or on-2 dancers and it will work regardless, even while you are still dancing on-2. I guess when you aren’t good yet and not a top notch salsera (when the f will it happen?!) then you can get away with stumbling around with on-1 dancers.
I received all my Salsa and drinking lessons when I was a punk in the South Bronx (known as “The Foxes from Fox Street). The house parties and Saturday night latin parties at “Hunt’s Point Palace” were instrumental in my rules for Salsa, follow your partner’s rythum and cues and always be one with the music (after a rum and coke).
thanks for sharing the salsa wisdom, Divafish. this is a good rule to follow. I will try to remember it as my teacher gets annoyed.